Emotional
The first time the DVDR985 is powered up, the front-panel display reads, "turn on tv." Of course, you must have one of the video outputs connected to the TV in order to proceed. The unit then takes you through the initial setup routine, which is well-designed, with good onscreen instructions. However, this routine can't be bypassed; you must complete it before you can use the unit. The only step missing in the procedure is setting the time and date, which can be done in the onscreen menu, but it should be part of the initial setup. The clock in my review sample ran very fast in manual mode, gaining a full 10 minutes in a month! Using the auto mode, in which the clock is set from a signal broadcast by PBS, corrected the problem.

The Monitor button toggles between the selected signal source and the image from the currently loaded disc (if any). However, the unit always powers up with Monitor set to display the disc image; this is like the VCRs of yesteryear, which always powered up with the TV/VCR switch set to VCR. In my opinion, the recorder should power up in whichever Monitor mode was engaged when it was last turned off.

Playing commercial DVDs worked just fine—with one surprising exception. When I played Video Essentials, a status box appeared in the upper left portion of the screen during the Swelltone logo at the beginning. The box indicated that an alternate camera angle was available and allowed me to select the angle with the Up/Down buttons. This particular alternate angle is a hoot (try it!), but the real problem is that the alternate-angle box appears whenever the option is available on any DVD—and it can't be disabled. According to Philips, an upcoming version of the software will include a switch to turn off this feature, but for now, it sure is annoying.

As expected, DVD playback using the progressive component output looked spectacular, thanks to the DCDi deinterlacer. The interlaced component and S-video outputs also looked excellent on all material. In addition, audio sounded fine—clean and detailed, with nothing to complain about in any frequency range.

But the main attraction of the DVDR985 is DVD recording, so I concentrated my efforts there. I began by recording some resolution test patterns from the Video Essentials DVD at all four quality/time levels. (Fortunately, VE is not copy-protected, so I could record test patterns from a DVD player using a component connection.) These level settings are located deep within the menu structure, but you can scroll through them with the Select button on the remote.

The 1-hour (HQ) mode looked the best; horizontal resolution started fading at 400 lines and was gone by 450, while the multiburst and frequency-sweep patterns revealed a gentle rolloff above 4MHz. The horizontal resolution in 2-hour (SP) mode was gone by about 375 lines, with a rolloff starting at about 3.5MHz. The 3-hour (LP) and 4-hour (EP) modes looked almost identical, with horizontal resolution out to about 290 and 275 lines, respectively, and a rolloff starting at about 2.5MHz.

Next, I recorded a variety of things directly from my cable feed at all four quality levels. The HQ mode looked the sharpest on clean cable channels, but the SP, LP, and EP modes looked surprisingly good, even on material with fast action. I didn't see much difference between the Standard and Sports settings of the LP/EP Rec Mode parameter.

To see if there is any discernible difference in the performance of DVD+RW and DVD-RW (Video mode), I fed my cable signal to the DVDR985 and Pioneer DVR-7000 from an RF distribution amp and recorded the same material on rewritable discs in both units simultaneously. After making sure the Pioneer's picture controls were set to their defaults, I started with both units in 2-hour mode. After recording several clips, I switched the Philips to 4-hour mode while keeping the Pioneer in 2-hour mode, just to see if I could record more material on a single DVD+RW disc without sacrificing too much quality.

During playback, I cued the clips as closely as possible and manually switched the component connection to the display, using the interlaced component output of each unit. In 2-hour mode, the picture quality was essentially identical. Even better, there was surprisingly little difference with the Philips in 4-hour mode; it was a bit darker, with slightly less shadow detail in dark scenes, and there were perhaps a few more artifacts in fast-moving scenes, but these were very minor. If I were recording critical broadcast material on the Philips, I'd probably use SP mode, but for less important content I'd certainly use EP, which is at least as good as VHS at its fastest speed, and provides four hours on a disc.

As mentioned earlier, there were some serious problems with the timer-recording function. The first time I entered the timer-programming mode, it automatically created a program for that date starting an hour before the current time and ending an hour after the current time. When I tried to clear the program, it reported a data error and wouldn't let me leave the programming screen until I had completed a program. In addition, after moving the cursor to an empty field, I couldn't move it anywhere else until I'd entered a value. Then, after entering a complete program and leaving the timer mode, the onscreen indicator showed a start time one hour after the time I'd programmed (which I verified by going back into the timer list); the unit did, in fact, begin recording at the later time.

There were also several problems with the timer's Date field. The Select button toggles among date, day of the week, and a setting for recording Monday through Friday. If the field showed a date, pressing the Up/Down buttons scrolled through dates as expected. But if the field showed a day of the week, pressing Up or Down immediately reverted to dates. By trial and error, I discovered that to select a day for weekly recordings, I had to first select a date that corresponded to the desired day of the week, then press Select until the day of the week appeared in the Date field. This is highly nonintuitive, and is not explained in the manual.

After discussing all this with Philips, they acknowledged that there were some bugs in the timer function (duh!), and told me that they'd been corrected in the newest version of the software, which they sent me on CD-ROM. After loading the new software, I was able to clear all timer programs, move the cursor among incomplete fields, and exit the timer mode, but the other problems remained. I can only hope that another software revision corrects them; at least the ability to load new software makes it possible to easily fix bugs like these.

In addition to cable broadcast signals, I'm very interested in archiving the VHS tapes I've made of my favorite shows, so I recorded some of them to disc using a JVC HM-DH30000U D-VHS VCR, which has a component output that I connected to the DVDR985's component input. All looked as good as can be expected from a VHS source. There is no reason to archive homemade tapes at any level higher than EP; even at the fastest VHS speed, the horizontal resolution disappears above 250 lines, so you gain nothing by archiving tapes at higher quality levels. As a result, you can fit four hours of VHS material on a single DVD+R/RW disc, which is great. If you want to dub laserdiscs, it would probably be best to use SP mode because of the medium's higher resolution.

The procedure for selecting one of the external inputs is not at all obvious; you must select tuner channel 0, which corresponds to external input 1, after which you scroll through the inputs with the Channel Up/Down buttons. This is not unique to the Philips, but I would have much preferred to have had an input-select button on the remote. Even worse, this is inadequately explained in the manual, and the index contains no hint of where to find it. (Philips claims that the DVDR985 manual was completely rewritten when the DVDR1000 manual was so poorly received. In my view, the new one needs some serious work, too.)

Editing is fairly straightforward, but many of the functions are accessed by pressing the Favorite Scene Selection (FSS) button, which is very nonintuitive. This button also has a scissors icon to indicate editing, which helps somewhat. On the plus side, it's great to be able to select any still image from each title to use as the thumbnail. Also, the process of naming discs and titles is much easier than Pioneer's cumbersome method.

And now, the $64,000 question: How compatible with standard DVD players are DVD+R/RW discs? I tried both types of discs in a variety of players, as well as Apple G4 PowerBook and Toshiba Satellite laptop computers with DVD drives. The results are detailed in the accompanying table; to summarize, both types of discs worked in most of the players I tried, which is great news.